So the back half of the CW Arrowverse's epic Crisis on Infinite Earth's crossover finally aired this week, and I promised more words about the Arrowverse and the crossover last month, so here we are. Spoilers abound!
On 15 Jan 2020 at 5:05am I wrote: #CrisisOnInfiniteEarths spoiler free review: low budget, pacing and writing issues, but idc because all the dc comics fan service kept making me smile
First the bad: as noted above, writing and pacing and budget issues plague the crossover, but this is typical of the Arrowverse as a whole.
Apparently I'm not done looking back at the 2010s yet. I had some “top tens of 2010s” discussions with some friends recently, here are my personal lists, each in no particular order:
My Top Ten Movies of the 2010s Avengers Endgame (2019).. I'm keeping only one slot per franchise, so I had to choose an MCU movies for this. Runner-ups for this slot were Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America Winter Soldier, and individually either one of those movies might be around the same or better than Endgame, but Endgame is the culmination of a decade's worth of movies and gave me the most enjoyment as a comic book fan.
Nothing in the cinema this month (going to the cinema is expensive!). I did watch a couple of animated movies this month:
Dragonball Super: Broly. I have some vague recollection of watching the original Broly movie, and I believe this one is much better. DBS Broly is a slightly more nuanced character than just “random raging monster” from the previous non-canon movie. The animation was okay, you could tell the animators were having fun with some of the battle parts.
Actually watched something in the cinema this month: Joker. I wasn't originally sure if I wanted to see it, I wasn't hyped for it at all in the months prior. But as the showing date came nearer, there was a lot of buzz around it so I decided to go anyway. I don't feel like it lived up to the hype and the warnings about promoting incel stuff, but at least it's one of the higher-grossing DC movies, so maybe we'll have more to come in that vein.
I finally got around to watching X-Men Dark Phoenix which I skipped when it came out mainly because (a) poor reviews, and while normally I'd have watched it anyway since I have not missed any of the X-Men movies in the cinema, not even the horrendous Wolverine Origins, there was also to consider that (b) I was in the US at the time and was only willing to spend my precious dollars on one expensive American cinema and Spider-man Far From Home won out.
Hmm, surprisingly I haven't watched too much stuff this month.
Eigasai I watched a Japanese film at Eigasai in UP Diliman for the first time ever, upon the invite of some friends. We saw One Cut of the Dead a comedy zombie film. It was great and it was hilarious, although you must make sure not to lose patience with the first thirty minutes. I went in blind not knowing anything about it other than “Japanese comedy zombie movie”, so you should too!
I was travelling for most of the past two months, so this covers both June and July, and I guess I haven't been able to watch too much. Maybe? IDK, we'll see.
Since I was in the US, I took the opportunity to finish watching Voltron: Legendary Defender which only had two seasons available on PH Netflix. Pretty good adaptation, lots of fun callbacks to the old series. Some annoying filler eps, especially in the middle seasons onwards.
The big TV thing of May 2019 was of course, the much maligned finale for Game of Thrones. I've written about that separately here.
Most of the US TV series also ended their runs in May. Arrowverse show seasons were littered with poor writing as usual. I rank the seasons in this order:
best is Legends of Tomorrow season 4. The reason Legends is the best is that they're not afraid to be outrageous.
After a much-maligned eighth and final season, HBO's Game of Thrones is done. Unmarked spoilers follow.
The eighth season was so notoriously bad, we got petitions asking for rewrites. Here's how I explained it to a friend after the notorious episode 5:
It's not about characters being killed, it's about bad writing because they're cramming. The writers were determined to finish the show in 2 smaller seasons so they're skipping a lot of necessary character development and characters just do stupid things because the plot demands it.
I've already written extensively about Avengers Endgame, but there are other things I watched this month too.
Shazam came out early this month, and while it was unfortunately sandwiched between MCU blockbusters, it was a fun adventure romp and surprised me in a few ways. I wrote a short spoiler-free review over on Tumblr.
TV-wise, I've been on a rewatch binge of 30 Rock that unfortunately started with season 4 due to Amazon Prime's weird way of presenting things.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I watch a lot of TV shows, rarely on TV itself though. I outgrew scheduled television maybe more than a decade ago. I'm reminded of this because I was going through some old disks and found burned episodes of stuff like Smallville, Heroes, The Simpsons, various anime, and so on.
Those were from the days before streaming though. These days an abundance of content is available online via the streaming services, no need to store all those episodes yourself.
Interesting article on closed captioning, or as I like to call them, subtitles. My first exposure to subtitles was anime of course, but these days I vastly prefer having subtitles on any show, even if it's dubbed in a language I do understand. From the article:
“Why do you have captions on?” I asked.
“It helps me with my ADHD: I can focus on the words, I catch things I missed, and I never have to go back,” she replied.
- if you’re not aware, episode 1 - Flash S05E09, episode 2 - Arrow S07E09, episode 3 - Supergirl S04E09 - I don’t usually review TV show crossovers but TBH I can’t recall any other any TV show crossovers and I just really, really enjoyed this one - basically a love letter to DC comics fans, a celebration of dc comics/TV/movies from the past four decades, and apparently a prelude of things to come. Non-comicbook fans might not be as happy as me lol - all three episodes were great (middle episode slightly worse because Arrow lol), I was smiling all the time and apploauding all the references
- frankly not everything made sense, but I’ll forgive it (I mean, have you *read* crisis on infinite earths? lol
- bonus: for more zaniness, also watch this week’s Legend’s of Tomorrow, they didn’t want to be outdone!
- I also watched Aquaman today, and that was fine (review later) but I decided to write a review of this crossover first! - tonight’s reading list (image attached)
I had put off watching PUNISHER (on Netflix) since i wasn't really too hyped about it. But now that I finally got around to it, I really like it.
The pacing was good throughout the season (which was one of the weakness of the recent MCU Netflix seasons such as Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Defenders) and it didn't falter halfway through and stuck the landing.
If you're an X-Men fan and you're not watching The Gifted, you're really missing out. It's a more serious, street-level take on “the mutant problem” than the movies could ever handle.
(Okay, maybe a teensy little spoiler in that image - but I couldn't resist lol)
this series moves forward each of the four protaganists
you get to see most of the supporting cast come back and maybe even get a teeny bit of development in
the plot is reasonably tight, i had a few minor nitpicks but now i can't even remember most of them
Maybe it's just the fanboy in me, but I was really excited when they met each other for the first time
Jessica Jones still the best character
Iron Fist still the weakest point (see the image), but it's not as bad as it was in his own series. It helps that he's not surrounded by the weird Meachum family and has a better ensemble to work off of. I also really enjoyed how enthusiastic he was at getting a team together
fight scenes are pretty good (at least better than in the Iron Fist series - also it's still weird that Daredevil fights a lot better than Iron Fist. He must have been a real slacker during that decade in Kun'Lun)
I suspect you can come in cold without watching any of the previous series, they do bring up their backstories a lot
I'm disappointed that there was no title drop
Episode guide:
ep1 ok
ep2 great
ep3 great
ep4 great
ep5 draggy, this was the weakest ep for me
ep6 ok
ep7 good
ep8 great. there's a post-credits scene
Finished watching Westworld. It's pretty good. Once you get introduced to the premise of the show, it's easy to imagine where it goes from there - these types of stories tend to go in that particular direction. Where the show shines is the narrative, the way the events unfold, everything is very well done. Some things from the earlier episodes are quite vague, unclear or sometimes downright contradictory, but things clear up pretty well near the end of the 10-episode run, though a number of things are still left hanging (including the fates of the surviving characters) for the presumptive season two to help clear up. Not for kids. Lots of violence and nudity and whatnot. Also, there's a post-credits scene.
So I watched a couple of eps of the new Criminal Minds spin-off Beyond Borders featuring Gary Sinise's FBI team intervening in crimes with American victims in other countries. I'm tempted to keep watching solely for the eventual episode set in the Philippines where there are militant leftists protesting against imperialist interference in local affairs
Finally finished watching Jessica Jones. It started out a bit slow, but the pace picked up after a few episodes. It's a different kind of grimdark than Daredevil was, but everything about the plot was great and tight. I was worried about what they planned to do with Kilgrave but it turned out he might have been a better villain here than Fisk was in Daredevil
Finished watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Season One felt a bit slow and I was thinking maybe the show was overhyped, but things picked up around season two and I can say the finale was fairly satisfying
After seven months of watching Deep Space Nine, I watched the last episode tonight. A very satisfying series and finale. Overall while TNG was a lot more iconic and well-known I feel like DS9 had a much better story to tell and a much more satisfying ending as well
